[A2k] Victoria Stodden paper: Open licensing to enable reproducible research

[Manon Ress]

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/09/open-licensing-to-enable-reproducible.html

Open licensing to enable reproducible research

Victoria Stodden is the winner of this year's Access to Knowledge
writing competition, for her paper, Enabling Reproducible Research:
Open Licensing for Scientific Innovation.  (This link points to a
draft; the final version isn't yet online.)

     Abstract:   There is a gap in the current licensing and copyright
structure for the growing number of scientists releasing their
research publicly, particularly on the internet. Scientific research
produces more than the final paper: the code, data structures,
experimental design and parameters, documentation, figures, are all
important for communication of the scholarship and replication of the
results. I propose the Open Research License for scientific
researchers to use for all components of their scholarship. It is
intended to encourage reproducible scientific investigation,
facilitate greater collaboration, and promote engagement of the larger
community in scientific learning and discovery.

     There is an analogy between the development of culture postulated
by the Creative Commons licenses and fundamental scientific
methodology: both envision advances through building on work that has
come before. The Creative Commons licenses are designed to facilitate
the creation of culture through the modification of existing media,
whereas scientific understanding grows through the reproduction and
extension of current scientific research. Providing an Open Research
License in the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses serves to allay
fears that prevent a scientist from publicly releasing all the
scholarship by including an attribution component, as well as a
provision that derivative works carry the same license. I argue using
the ORL can only increase our scientific understanding, at very
minimal cost.

The competition is sponsored by the Information Society Project at
Yale Law School and the International Journal of Communications Law
and Policy, with a $1,000 cash prize put up by Kaltura.  The prize
will be awarded next week at the A2K3 Conference (Geneva, September
8-10, 2008).  Congratulations, Victoria!
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Manon Ress
manon.ress@keionline.org,

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